I’ll begin this by saying that I actually like Bari Weiss. I respect the journey she’s on, and I think she does some good work. So it’s not my intention to burn her to the ground today.
On the other hand, the rather intense ratio that Weiss received for a very poorly-thought-out lecture she delivered on X to the unwashed masses of the MAGA movement was very well-deserved.
You might not have seen this. It’s gotten more than 1.1 million views since she posted it Tuesday afternoon. But while it’s a lousy piece of argumentation, it’s instructive enough to discuss for what it represents.
Here’s the X post in question:
What can we learn from our recent history? Of the way that the far left destroyed the center left? One big takeaway is that if a political movement does not police its ranks, does not draw lines, if it neglects to protect its borders, if it does not defend its sacred values, it…
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) February 18, 2025
Weiss starts out rather shakily by making the contention that a political movement can’t survive if it doesn’t police its ranks and defend its values. The statement might be correct in describing a little-d democratic political movement, but there are lots of political movements that don’t fit that description and don’t conform to her rules, and some of them tend to last a bit longer than she thinks.
That might be a mere quibble, but then she says this:
What are those values? They include the rule of the law. The belief in the inalienable rights of each individual. That we are all created in the image of God and it is that—and not our ethnicity or our IQ score—that gives us our worth and that makes us all equal. It is a rejection of mob violence. It is the view that the West is good and that America is good, and that we deserve our heroes along with our whole complex history.
These values are not left or right. They are foundational. They are civilizational. And they have always required constant vigilance to preserve.
Well, not really. It’s hard to find any foundational commitment to those things on the part of the Hard Left in America. They don’t believe in the rule of law at all and have demonstrated that beyond a doubt over the past couple of decades. They certainly don’t think rights are inalienable or that we’re created in the image of God; they don’t believe in God and they think government is the grantor of individual rights. They see mob activity, to include violence, as a positive tool for social change, and they certainly don’t think America or the West are good.
The argument, of course, is that Weiss isn’t talking about the Hard Left in America but rather the political movement she shares with the MAGAs she’s lecturing.
And this is where we have a problem.
You know Bari Weiss’ back story, don’t you? She was an editor at the New York Times who found herself dispatched from that institution’s Garden of Eden for the sin of advocating that Sen. Tom Cotton should have a platform to make the case for military action to put down Black Lives Matter riots back in the summer of 2020.
Since then, Weiss has gone independent, launching a new media organ called The Free Press and embarking on a career as a podcaster. She turns out to have become more successful on her own than she ever was as, essentially, a faceless bureaucrat at the Times, and good for her.
But Bari Weiss isn’t a conservative, and she isn’t a MAGA revivalist. She’s a liberal.
There are a lot of those who have made common cause with the MAGA movement, and this is a good thing. You want to build a broad coalition of support for your ideas; the wider the front you present the enemy, the better the chances of your turning his flank and surrounding him. Weiss is one of many liberals who are part of that coalition, and many of them have become quite popular on the Right — Elon Musk, who might not be quite as liberal as he used to be, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, and Joe Rogan are examples.
And they ought to be welcomed.
But what needs to be understood is that the liberals who lost out to the Hard Left as it destroyed the former political consensus in this country are not going to be allowed to dictate terms to their new friends on the right.
She’s part of our coalition. We’re not part of hers.
Before we get too far along here, allow me to plug in one of the key themes from the book I’m writing. Frequent readers of this column will note that lately I’ve been talking about how we’re entering a brand new era of American politics, and probably world politics as well. An era that began with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as our president in 1932 has ended with Donald Trump’s second electoral victory last November.
This matters because the very large political shifts like the one we’re currently seeing carry with them consequences that aren’t merely political. They’re cultural and economic as well. Practically every aspect of our societal life will necessarily be affected.
And what happens in such situations, as happened in this country in the early 1930s as FDR brought the New Deal home and in the 1860s as we fought and recovered from the Civil War as the era before that one began, there is a necessary reexamination of all of the precepts of the just-ended era.
So yes, MAGA is going to reexamine lots of common understandings from the Third Era as the Fourth Era begins.
And Bari Weiss’ problem is that she’s now a product of the Fourth Era, but still holds on to a Third Era mindset. It’s not working.
Here’s an example from her X post:
But that’s not the sense you get online these days—and some places offline, too—where power is celebrated instead of principle. Where power is quickly becoming the only principle.
If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far right (not the one defined by cable news, which includes many in this room) devours what remains of the center-right.
She isn’t clear what she means by this, so one is forced into interpretations that could be wrong.
But it would appear that she’s decrying the fact that the Lindsey Grahams and Mitch McConnells and Bill Cassidys of the world are being viewed with derision by the MAGA movement.
And if that interpretation is correct, then this is a homeless Third Era liberal upset that Third Era “conservatives,” the Bush Republicans who consistently lost fight after fight to the liberals as the liberals in turn lost out to the Hard Left, are no longer around to be their pals in political consensus.
And hey — it’s really cool that we’re all aligned against Jamie Raskin and Rachel Maddow and J.B. Pritzker these days, but of the three parts of this winning coalition, the homeless liberals aren’t the active ingredient. MAGA is.
If you take a historical view, what you’ll recognize is that MAGA has been around for a long time. That’s why I call it revivalism, because it isn’t just a Trump movement, and it’s going to outlive Trump. MAGA was with Ronald Reagan when he halted American decline in the 1980s, and it was with Newt Gingrich when he led the revolution that retook the House of Representatives in 1994. It reappeared as the Tea Party movement in 2010, and then it fell in behind Trump starting in 2016.
Those Third Era “conservatives” Weiss doesn’t want to see devoured have abused and mistreated the populist MAGA revivalists on virtually a nonstop basis since Reagan left office in 1989. If she doesn’t think spoils and trophies will be taken as the damage they contributed to is repaired, then maybe she needs to sit out the political fights.
It gets worse.
If you aren’t aware of the dangers that come with apparent victory, if you think, That’s impossible, I believe you are as naive as the professors at Harvard who still email me to say, “Can you believe what’s happening?!”
What does this group, which differs from the rest of the right in its open embrace of illiberalism, sound like? An awful lot like the far left.
This group says that we are in a war—a war here at home—and that because it’s war, because the stakes are life and death, the normal rules of the game must be suspended.
It sure seems like Weiss is the naive one here.
What “normal” rules are we talking about? That politics stops at the water’s edge? That rule was blown apart when Teddy Kennedy negotiated away Central America behind Reagan’s back and when the Left took the dictators’ coin to push “climate change” policies that benefited our enemies at the expense of our economy. That we don’t weaponize the judicial system? That we should respect the taxpayer by not engaging in Third World waste and corruption?
Those rules must be reestablished. Providing amnesty to the people who broke them into little pieces only ensures the “norms” will not be restored. There must be accountability for all that damage.
The pendulum must be allowed to swing all the way to the other side before it can be brought back to rest in the center. This doesn’t mean we should allow the current victors unfettered revenge on their enemies, but that isn’t happening. Nothing DOGE is doing, for example, is unreasonable. Nothing in Donald Trump’s reset of American foreign policy is beyond the comprehension of an objective observer of history. There aren’t midnight SWAT raids at the houses of David Axelrod and Robert Reich.
Weiss tells us she doesn’t like the rhetoric of those who want to see accountability:
They say those who don’t go along are squishes or traitors or were secret leftists all along. Or they accuse them of being conservative or Republican in name only, which is a version of the “false consciousness” Marxists were so fond of telling people they suffer from.
They say that it’s not enough to return to normal—that returning to normal isn’t an option—and instead it’s time to give the other side a taste of their own medicine.
They say we were treated cruelly. And so cruelty is the necessary response.
They say that the thing we are trying to conserve has already been destroyed—and perhaps never even existed at all.
They say that reform is a losers’ strategy, and that the whole thing needs to be burned down.
Like the far left, they have no use for history, but judge people living and dead in the ideological light of presentism, or simply reimagine them from scratch. As the left defaced and desecrated statues of Churchill, the vandals on the right desecrate his name and his memory.
There is very little Marxist dynamic in MAGA politics. In fact, part of the frenetic energy of the Trump administration that is so appreciated by the people in the movement is an explicit rejection of the Marxist dialectic; namely that there is some inexorable arc of history that will ultimately bend in the direction of a collectivist world in which only the views of the party will be held. MAGA knows that history must be made, and moments must be seized, when the opportunity presents.
Does Bari Weiss not believe we’re in a pivotal moment in American history? That the “gains” of the Hard Left who displaced her and her fellow liberals from a place of prominence have to be reversed if the revival of our country is to materialize? If so, she probably isn’t part of this coalition after all.
Yes, USAID needs to be burned down. The project it was established for, namely winning the Cold War, no longer exists, and without an overarching mission it has been corrupted and abused by the radicals. Denying them that instrument is a crucial part of securing a meaningful victory in changing how the country is run. That isn’t hateful and it isn’t radical, and it certainly isn’t vandalism.
One can’t help but see this as another example of the liberal upset at the loss of hegemony over the Stupid Party “conservative” in days of yore.
And now a non sequitur:
Again, it’s a question of borders. In this case, they actively erase the line between good and evil, and between past and present—looking backward to a place where “things went wrong,” as if it’s possible to turn back the clock.
What so alarms the Left isn’t that MAGA is attempting to “turn back the clock.” If that’s what was really happening here, they would be trashing America circa 1988, or 1955, or 1922. No, what frightens them is that the currently ascendant populist movement is looking toward the future. And what is happening is not “erasing” the line between good and evil but rather reexamining the current understanding with an eye toward improving it.
Is it an unalloyed good that America should go into trillions of dollars of debt protecting an infantile and swiftly declining Europe that actively immiserates her citizens? Are we really doing more good than harm for our intended beneficiaries, much less our own people? Is the Ukraine War an unalloyed good? Are we on the right track supplying billions toward the fairly dubious prospect of a two-state solution in the Middle East? Does “free trade” with the Chinese slave state produce a net win for our people?
There was a time not that long ago that maybe we could turn the clock back to when the line between good and evil was a lot clearer than it is now. But much of the Third Era was spent blurring the lines of morality. Why are we bound to accept those blurry lines when we’ve voted to chase out all of the political assumptions of that era and our consumers are chasing out the cultural and economic assumptions as well?
And now she finishes with a flourish:
While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—this new right eulogizes the original ones. And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms.
All of this seems as obvious to me as the notion that a girl cannot become a boy. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time saying these things out loud right now.
Why?
You can’t get any more retrograde Third Era than invoking Godwin’s Law and attacking those with whom you disagree of being Nazis, and Weiss falls back on that for a closing argument.
Shouldn’t she be obligated to make a specific allegation in this regard, rather than simply barfing it out there for us to peruse? Who is rehabilitating Hitler?
Is this aimed at Tucker Carlson for his having had on a pop historian who challenged Churchill and the premises of World War II? Is it aimed at AfD for (though it’s a somewhat unruly party containing all kinds of people with goofball notions) daring to speak kindly of German nationalism?
I can’t say I’ve seen anybody “rehabilitating” Adolf Hitler in current American politics.
Certainly it’s a reasonable conclusion that while Hitler was Satanic in his rhetoric and actions, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao were equally as evil. After all, their death tolls rivaled and exceeded Hitler’s, and their ideologies were every bit as feverish. All of them displayed a fundamental hatred for humanity that is far closer to what we see from the Hard Left than from MAGA.
But her framing of Hitler as a “right-wing” bugaboo is another retrograde Third Era notion that ought to be reexamined.
With this new era dawning and the opportunity for reexamination of history, perhaps it’s time to put paid the idea of Nazism and fascism as “right-wing” ideologies. Hitler and Mussolini were men of the Left, not of the Right. Their differences with the communists were not ideological. Fascism was national socialism, while communism was international socialism, but both of them advocated socialism.
It is a calumny, a fraud and an insult that those of us who despise socialism should have goose-stepping Axis goons foisted on us as ideological brethren. We never asked for that, we’ve never invited it. At best, there were Republicans in the 1930s who, amid the ruins of their party in the aftermath of the 1932 elections, embraced isolationism as a response to the globalist ambitions of Wilsonian progressives and FDR’s Soviet-infiltrated “brain-trust,” but that was an awfully long time ago in much different circumstances. It’s hardly a solid enough foundation to continue these stupid narratives.
And yet she’s continuing them as a closing argument to a diatribe against people she’s supposedly attempting to make common cause with.
Again, I actually like Bari Weiss. I don’t want to chase her out of the ascendant MAGA-led coalition. But she has to understand she doesn’t lead it. And if she’s going to be part of it, then she certainly doesn’t get to unjustly trash it as she did on Tuesday. None of these charges hold water, and it was bad judgment to make them without any clear examples of what she’s talking about.
In a larger sense, this is a lesson for the liberals as a whole. I’ve been advocating that they be allowed to retreat with their name intact, which is to say I would prefer that we on the right stop using “liberal” as a pejorative to describe all on the left. I don’t lump Bari Weiss in with AOC and Jasmine Crockett, which is one reason Weiss’ lecture on Tuesday was so disappointing.
But in return, it would be nice if we got an understanding that this isn’t 1964 anymore. That the consensus by which Daniel Patrick Moynihan was allowed a slight advantage over William F. Buckley no longer exists. MAGA isn’t taking a back seat to anyone now, because there is too much to do and too much to fix. The liberals should be welcome aboard this coalition. But they don’t get to dictate terms to it anymore.
MORE from Scott McKay:
The Spectacle Ep. 193: The Future of U.S. Relations With Europe, Russia, and Ukraine
Margaret Brennan and the Good Germans at CBS News
The Spectacle Ep. 191: DOGE and Artificial Intelligence Reveal Government Corruption
